Mass-Produced Sats Will Offer Low-Cost Access to Space

Advances in electronics and launch technologies are enabling a new class of smaller, cheaper, and lower-flying satellites that could revolutionize how we use satellite imagery and communications. But it all depends on low-cost access to space and the emergence of customers who will use them.

On the factory floor at Sierra Nevada Corporation in Louisville, Colo., four identical satellites are taking shape in separate assembly areas, or pods. These are being built for tracking communications company ORBCOMM, which recently lost the first of these new satellites after a misbehaving SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket dumped it into the wrong orbit. These birds are members of a new breed of spacecraft that are more affordable because they are being made in quantity and with off-the-shelf rather than custom-made components.

Satellite development has been an expensive, time-consuming, and risky affair. Communications companies typically spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars on a launch that, as ORBCOMM knows all too well, carries no guarantee of success. But soon mass production of the kind that Sierra Nevada is helping to pioneer—of full-featured spacecraft, not just tiny research craft like CubeSats—could make satellites cheaper and less risky. It could also blow off the doors to space commerce and allow many more businesses to get in on the action. An explosion of new ventures based on cheap, ubiquitous satellite imagery and communications could be just around the corner.

"This new information backbone is being built in LEO," says Mark Sirangelo, head of Space Systems at Sierra Nevada, referring to the low Earth orbits the new satellites will occupy. "It's much like the terrestrial Internet backbone."

Chris Lewicki is chief engineer for Planetary Resources, which, in addition to devising a grand plan to mine the asteroids, is building the first commercial space telescopes. "It just so happens," he says, "that everything that the computer-makers are innovating for a smaller cellphone that does more in a smaller spot, and the batteries last longer—those are exactly the same problems that you always have in space . . . It's wonderful to be on the back side of all that innovation in the consumer world and be able to pick the best pieces and send them off to space."

For example, Lewicki and his team are building their space telescopes around commercially available sensors rather than engineering them themselves. They have realized further cost savings by using 3D printers to quickly build prototypes for testing and design refinement almost as soon as they can conceive them. Like Sierra Nevada, Planetary Resources will build its completed spacecraft design in quantity to take advantage of the economies of scale to be had by ordering many of the same parts and reusing the same tooling in the manufacturing process. They are also sourcing parts from consumer and conventional industrial sources rather than from expensive satellite-component suppliers.

Now, when it comes to satellites, the concept of mass production is relative. "When we're talking mass production in the space industry, you've got to keep in mind we're not talking like mass production in most other industries," Futron Corporation space analyst Jeff Foust tells PM. "If you build a couple dozen satellites that are identical to each other in a short period of time, that's mass production."

But in 2011 just 133 satellites were launched worldwide, so even small improvements in satellite production could change the industry. The question for these new satellite mass-producers, though, is how much more demand for satellites there would be if the cost and time-to-market came down. "The first barrier to mass production of satellites is finding a customer for them," Foust says.

Sierra Nevada

One of Sierra Nevada's technicians tests a satellite on the vibration table.

One idea for cheaper satellites: creating a network of them where only a few existed before. Conventional satellites can cost $100 million to $300 million and up, according to Foust, and established satellite-imaging companies can afford only a couple of satellites each. "With a couple of satellites, you've got maybe a couple of chances a day at most to take an image of a particular area," he says. It would take a constellation of satellites, properly placed, to provide more or less continuous coverage. And that's the business plan of Skybox Imaging, based in Mountain View, Calif.

The company came out of a Stanford University graduate student project, and it has already raised $100 million in venture capital over four years. It plans to launch the first of the satellites in its constellation, which it is building itself, in 2013. "High-resolution, high-temporal satellite pictures of the Earth" is the way Skybox co-founder Ching-Yu Hu describes her company's products. In other words, high-resolution imagery that is updated in near-real time. It's a service that has never before been available.

Skybox and Planetary Resources are planning to build their satellites, get them launched, and then start collecting the terabytes of imagery they will send back. They are hoping at that point to have customers in place to buy the imagery or even pony up for the promise of dedicated Earth observation time. Planetary Resources will also offer views of the greater universe, with the telescopes at times pointed into space.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy's devastating run through the U.S. East Coast, it is easy to see the value, for example, of real-time satellite imagery of storm damage and the efforts to clean it up. But it's also easy to appreciate the cool factor of having access to one's very own personal spy sat, which could effectively happen if a company springs up to repackage Skybox imagery, for example, for use in consumer mapping applications. Finding that elusive parking spot in midtown traffic could, in the near future, become a simple matter of firing up an app on a smartphone for a bird's-eye view of the street. Cheap, plentiful satellites could make those and many other uses feasible.

Skybox and the other new manufacturers are counting on being able to lower the cost of building a new satellite from hundreds of millions of dollars to one-tenth of that, and that's just for starters. Spacecraft costing in the single-digit millions could follow. (Of course, all those extra satellites will heighten existing concerns about astral collisions and space debris. A beefed-up space-traffic control could be what's called for, as outlined by PM contributing editor and University of Tennessee space law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds.)

The last time new businesses based on low-cost, low-flying constellations of satellites were attempted, in the 1990s, the companies went bust, partly because of high launch and manufacturing costs. The next generation of companies hopes that smaller, cheaper, more capable spacecraft launched on more affordable rockets, like the Falcon 9 or the upcoming Virgin Galactic LauncherOne, will succeed where their predecessors failed.

Michael Belfiore is the author of Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space.

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